A Life's Work

by Rachel Cusk

  Upstairs, my reunion with freedom, so longed for, was panicked and unsatisfactory, and not only because my daughter exerted on me so strong a magnetism from her rug down below that I would emerge from my study every few minutes to sit on the stairs and listen for signs of distress. There was something brutal in our separation, an atmosphere I remembered from past instances of dark compulsion: the atmosphere of Sunday nights when I would return to my boarding school, of exams and injections and doctors’ surgeries, of rejection and disfavour and punishment; of pain, too, more recently recalled, the adult pain of unhappiness and of things happening that you did not want to happen, but which happened nonetheless. It surprised and distressed me that all of my life that did not include my daughter or relate directly to her must now be lived in this hated, familiar dark; that its sum must be increased, its space extended like catacombs dug beneath my happiness, when I had vowed to shut the door on it for ever. I would go down to the kitchen on some pretext or other and my daughter would sometimes cry when she saw me, her eyes confused and imploring; and I would feel beset by my power to end our mutual misery. My failure to do so plagued me, given that I mostly spent my expensive hours alone worrying about what was going on downstairs.

  Celia failed her English exam and entered dark times. She began to come very late or not at all, telephoning with stories of headaches and missed buses. I had taken on some work, and during one of Celia’s last-minute absences was driven to sit frantically typing at my computer with a deadline some forty-five minutes away while my daughter lay crying on my study floor. When Celia did come she was silent and morose, walking as if every step hurt her, her eyes shining with unhappiness. She admitted that the man she was involved with was treating her badly. My daughter, too, had seen through our little ruse. In Celia’s sad face she read the warning of her imminent abandonment, and she struggled to prevent it. From upstairs I could hear the siren of her cry, and occasionally caught a strained, desperate note in Celia’s musical utterances, heard the frantic squeaking of the baby carriage’s hinges as she tried too hard to lull my daughter into sleep. One day she told me that she was starting a new course and would only be able to come for two hours a week. We agreed that I would have to look for someone else.

  Flicking idly through television channels one evening, I found myself plunged into the middle of a documentary about the travails of rich American housewives. A woman with a sharp tanned face and expensive-looking hair was sitting on a leather sofa discussing the deficiencies of her children’s nanny. The nanny was glimpsed in the background, a blur of dark skin, her head ducked, putting toys in a box. She was Peruvian, it transpired, and had left four children of her own behind in order to come to America and make sufficient money to support them. She saw them once or twice a year. You know, said the woman, Maria is wonderful with my kids, but sometimes I get the feeling that she’s, you know, kind of too wonderful. I mean, I know that she probably misses her kids, and I know that you can’t, like, forbid her to touch my kids, but at the end of the day, they’re not her kids, you know? Like, the other day I was in the pool and Maria was in the hot tub with my daughter, and she had my daughter on her lap, and I’m like, you know, put her down, she knows how to sit in the hot tub! She tossed her immaculate hair with pique.

  I put an advertisement in the local paper, and was surprised when a man rang up in response. His name was Stefan. He was Slovenian. He was twenty, and had worked in London as an au pair for a year. Now he was doing a PhD at university, but needed a part-time job. I invited him to the house for a talk. He was slight and dapper, with the attire and demeanour of an accountant. He carried a briefcase and his English was aristocratic, shot through with glassy slivers of Eastern Europe. I offered him a glass of wine and a cigarette, both of which he accepted, and we sat in the garden. He had enjoyed his experiences as an au pair. He liked cooking and housekeeping. He had loved the family he worked for: their children, he told me, were adorable. He still saw the parents, indeed they were coming round that very evening for dinner. He produced a reference from them: it was glowing. Their youngest child had been four months old when Stefan had joined the family. She was very special, said Stefan, very intelligent. He shook his head, smiling, as if her charms were impossible to convey. I asked him about his PhD. It appeared that he was studying transport links to London’s airports. My daughter remained firmly seated in my lap during this time. Stefan’s manner towards her was polite but understated, as if they were business colleagues. She betrayed no feelings about the matter either way. We agreed that he would start the next week.

  The telephone rang and rang in the following days, and each time I would pick it up and hear the voices of women, voices old and young, voices bespeaking hardship or hope or desperation, or a sort of blithe confusion, as if they didn’t know whether it was for a job or a second-hand ironing board that they were calling, and didn’t much care. We’ve already found somebody, I said, over and over again; I’m sorry. These negotiations were shabby, frank, guilty, devoid of love or care. There was a harshness, the harshness of money and survival, just beneath their surface. It seemed incredible to me that I was bartering with my daughter’s small existence in this way; that by coming into the world she had created a problem which I was solving so randomly and with such fearful incompetence. Stefan arrived punctually and began doing the ironing. He asked if he could do the shopping later, and what we would like for supper. Did we like cabbage? He had a sheaf of Slovenian recipes up his sleeve. While we were talking the telephone rang, and I handed him my daughter. His face was alarmed. He held her as one might hold a small bomb. When I put down the telephone he handed her back. I saw that immediate action was necessary. I stood about for a while and then said I had to go and do some work. I placed my daughter on the sofa two feet away from where Stefan stood, iron in hand, and left the room. Eavesdropping from the stairs, I counted a long moment of silence. Presently, I heard a sort of clucking sound, such as one might make to goad along a horse. My daughter began to grumble, and the clucking got louder. Before long, she began to cry. Don’t cry, I heard Stefan say brightly, don’t cry, baby. I went back downstairs. My daughter lay where I had left her on the sofa, screaming, with Stefan doing a sort of dance of comfort above her, as if she were emanating some powerful heat that prevented him from getting too close. You’ve got to pick her up, I explained. I felt profoundly tired.

  Stefan’s efficiency quickly gathered to itself a range of housekeeping measures: he polished furniture, dusted, stocked the larder. He had the air of a butler in a stately home, attentive and discreet. The kitchen hung with the boiled-clothes smell of cabbage. Occasionally he would take my daughter for a walk in her stroller and, obeying my orders to return if she cried, quickly came back again. She was given back to me, entire, like something too big to be sent, like something impossible. I gained the distinct impression of her inferiority to his former, beloved charge. I told Stefan that I was very sorry, but that we had to have somebody who could look after the baby. He accepted his dismissal with some charm. The next day he came back again and rang on the doorbell. His flatmates, he told me, had convinced him that his sacking was unfair and merited compensation. Drily, I asked what sort of compensation he had in mind. A month’s salary, he replied, was the norm. I offered him a week’s. He accepted and went away, having obviously found the conversation difficult.

  All through these weeks I retained an impression of my daughter’s eyes, dark and bright and locked on mine as she was passed from one stranger, with their story, their particular body and breath, their indefinable aura, to another. I saw in her eyes bewilderment and acceptance and some evidence of bravery, as she viewed me across the gulf of my life, the gulf I had put between us. She had tried, in some small way, to make it work. I understood that she would have taken whatever I had offered, had I forced her to, but I had never given it time, nor the ultimate sacrifice of my own sincere assurance that it would work out. I had discovered, too, that those hours I had purchased
back were damaged and second-hand. They were cramped and unsatisfactory; they were hours whose crazy ticking could be heard. Living those hours was like living in a taxi cab. Working in them was hard enough; pleasure, or at least rest, was unthinkable. I couldn’t fit my world into a space carved, as it seemed to me, from my daughter’s own flesh. Besides, I had conveyed to her distinctly the fact that I thought her abandonment was unreasonable, her protests fair: I wasn’t ready, it seemed, to let her love somebody else.

  Late one night, the telephone rang. It was Rosa. She was ringing to let us know how badly we had treated her. You people, she said, you pay slave wages. You are rich and you pay slave wages for slave labour. You are disgusting. Your house is disgusting. She demanded money in recompense. She had seen a large cheque on my desk during her tour of the house. What had I done to deserve that money? It was she who slaved all day. Her tirade became obscene, hysterical. She swore, she impugned. I held the receiver away from my ear and looked out through the dark glass over London and into the night. When I listened again, Rosa was still talking. You are a horrible woman, she said. She put down the phone.

  Don’t Forget to Scream

  We moved out of the city to a university town, a place where people lived in order to forget that the rest of the world existed. There was little crime here, or chaos, or traffic, or noise, or dirt, or difference. It was all held at bay, as if by a magic circle, by the ring road, beyond which lay a tundra of the unwanted, of petrol stations and round-abouts, of factories and straggling conurbations and red, scarred swathes of land where new housing was going up. The ring road pulsed night and day with cars and trucks that circled the ancient buildings and cobbled streets like predators. Wherever you were you could hear its submerged roar, like that of the sea.

  Our house was in a residential area that had the texture of a suburb or prairie. It was here that the grand terraces of the town centre began to separate themselves, if only by a few feet, into houses whose cramped architecture fancifully suggested ranches and chateaux. The streets bristled with the frontiers of fences and garden gates. Our road was an artery by which the local shops could be reached, and saw discreet but considerable traffic. Sturdy women in their fifties wearing thick sandals and flowered dresses ploughed up and down it on bicycles. Bearded men with broad, womanish hips dressed all in beige plodded past our window, walking small, yappy dogs. The men were mute and miserable and cringed from encounter; but the women swept down our road like storms, cyclones of disapproval, the wind of their censure whistling through cracks in doors and windows as they passed. They briskly eyed our overgrown front lawn, the crates of empty wine bottles outside our door. Such women had no fear of ridicule or rebuke as they pedalled on in their summer dresses, baskets creaking, showing the white, freckled slabs of their arms, remonstrating with the occasional motorist or dog-owner or litter-bug. They ruled this peculiar enclave, with its capacious, obedient streets, and their spirit presided over what life presumed to struggle through its oppressive, middle-aged soil.

  The other mothers I saw all seemed to be far older than I. In London I had rarely encountered people out with children, but here the high street teemed with them. Our strollers bowed and whirled and sidestepped in a pavement minuet. I would occasionally find myself staring like a prude at women with grey hair and pregnant bellies, at grandmother-mothers with shoals of small children. Indeed, I had never seen so many children before in my life; and yet sex was nowhere in the air, for the fathers of these children were hardly seen. The restaurants and cafés were filled with women; the shops and parks were filled with women. Early on a Sunday morning men could occasionally be sighted, pushing prams uncomfortably around the empty streets; but by lunchtime they had vanished again. The whole place had the atmosphere of a war, or a laboratory experiment, or the past. The women on bicycles who policed its sexless avenues themselves possessed a peculiar and disturbing girlishness, with their dumpy flowered dresses and thick white arms: the girlishness of nuns, of ageing virgins, of unmarried daughters. Their spiritual mothers were wiry, veined, white-haired women in court shoes and navy pleated skirts, with faces sharp as birds’, who congregated outside the bank or the grocer’s and conducted the pitiless business of their conversation.

  I believed that I would never have lived in such a place when my life was my own; and although it is in the purpose of such places to ensure that it is not, to remove your life from your control and hence prevent it from becoming a public danger, I had to claim my share of responsibility in the matter of relinquishing London and the existence to which over the years my unfettered desire had given shape. I could not tell you how great this share was: I never had time or opportunity to quantify it. All I know is that it began to grow in me after I had a child: a second gestation, of dissatisfaction, sometimes of actual distress. A feeling of dispossession and rootlessness took hold of me, thrived in me, putative but vigorous, and it was only once I had ceased to house it and actually brought it to life that I saw it was merely a phantom, a construction. I had given, it seemed, concrete expression to my grief at the fact that I could no longer live the life that I had been living. I had moved away because I thought I no longer belonged where I was.

  No sooner had I done it than I found myself remarkably restored. Everything that motherhood had seemed to put at an unbreachable remove now was obstructed by mere geography. The loneliness of hours spent with a baby at home merged with that of moving to a new, friendless and uncongenial place. What was staid and humdrum and restricting and depriving about motherhood found its incarnation in our surroundings. My life shed its burden, passed it on. Imagine, I found myself saying to my partner one day, how much easier it would be looking after children if you weren’t stuck in this boring hole, if you had all your friends around and places to go in the evening and things to do at the weekend. You mean in London, he said.

  So our life in the provinces quickly took on the tenor of a prison sentence, whose term could not be set because of the difficulty of admitting to ourselves or others that we had erred. There was an etiquette, I felt, to the making of such mistakes: they ought to take time, although we did have a friend who had moved out of London and back in the space of a few days. He played in a tennis four on Saturdays, and managed to relocate his family to the north of England, realise his error, and bring them all back again without missing a game. In any case, at first our new life felt, if not exactly right, then at least like something more bearable than a mistake. It was late summer, and in a languorous heatwave we swam daily in a nearby river, a wide, still ribbon of water that meandered through a great meadow where cows and wild horses grazed. People boated on this river: elderly couples in motor launches, boisterous groups on canal-boat holidays, people sailing dinghies down this quaint, pastoral strait as if it were the sea. There were men dressed in sailing garb – jaunty caps and handkerchiefs tied around the neck – that would have looked more at home in a San Francisco nightclub. There were couples you could glimpse through the fishbowls of their glazed, airtight cabins, the man sitting grimly at the wheel, the woman flicking about the cabin with a duster or making cups of unearned tea. On another stretch of river people poled punts through the thick green waters; students and tourists mostly, their loud laughter or silence alike indicative of self-consciousness, for this was a well-worn idyll, an enactment of privilege derived from the pages of Brideshead Revisited. Once I saw a group of students on a punt, the boys dressed in white flannels and boaters, the girls in diaphanous dresses and straw hats. Someone even carried a teddy bear. They had a picnic basket and an old-fashioned gramaphone on board, from which emanted loud, distorted strains of Edith Piaf. They held champagne glasses. One boy waved the bottle at other punts as they passed. They were a strange group, ill-fitted for the hedonism at which they strained: the boys were spotty and beak-nosed, the girls dumpy and bespectacled. Their riotousness was uncertain, bordering clumsily on abuse. I cringed for them, but the taint of their pretentious outing remained on my mind over the
long months, like a warning, impossible to rub away.